The moon had now disappeared behind the distant mountains, leaving their dark outlines sharply cut out against the clear greenish light of the western sky. They looked like the shore to some mysteriously transparent, self-luminous, but deadly calm ocean. Several shreds of vapour floated in this mild radiance, like small icebergs in the north sea, during the long twilight night, while the sun is circling round just below the horizon; while to windward[2] the fast reddening sky, and the rise of the morning star, gave token of the near approach of day. [2] Once for all. In the West Indies, from the sea-breeze, or trade-winds, always blowing from the east, objects or places are universally indicated, even during a temporary calm, as being situated _to windward_ or _to leeward_, according as they are to the _eastward_ or _westward_ of the speaker. We got home, and tumbled into bed, and it was two o'clock in the afternoon before I rose to breakfast. The sea-breeze was by this time blowing strong, almost half a gale of wind, making the shingles of the roof clatter like watchmen's rattles, and whistling through the house like a tornado. I had just risen, and taken my razors out of my desk, which lay open on the dressing-table, when the wooden-blinds of the window fell down with a loud bang, from the dropping out of the pin that held them shut, and away went the letters and papers it contained, scattered by the reckless breeze east, west, north, and south; some flying up to the roof, others sticking against the walls far above my ken, as resolutely as if they had been pasted on by little Waddington the billsticker himself; while, by a sort of eddy wind, several were whisked away out of the door (that at the moment was opened by a negro boy with my coat in one hand, a beautiful pine-apple on a plate in the other, and a tin shaving-jug _full of boiling water on his head_), and disappeared amongst the branches of a large umbrageous kennip-tree, that overshadowed the back-yard, to be worked up in due time into bird's nests. "There they go," cried I. "Why,--Sally, cousin Sally!"--she was bustling about her domestic matters--"see all my letters flying about the yard there; send some of the small fry to catch them." I continued my shaving, until another puff whipped up the piece of paper I had been wiping my razor on, charged as it was with soap-suds, and there it ascended spirally in a tiny whirlwind, until it reached the roof, where, thinking it would stick to the rafters, after being tired of its gyrations, the room being unceiled, I shouted to Sally to bring me one of the vagrant papers to supply its place; but, as I peeped through the blinds to observe how she came on, I felt something settle down as gently as a snow-flake on the crown of my head. "Do try and secure my _love_-letters, cousin."